ns and strangers, forming, altogether, a procession of 30,000
persons! One steam fire engine was drawn by four white horses, with
crape festoons on their heads.

Well I am--just--about--asleep--

Your brother
SAM.

Among other things, we gather from this letter that Orion Clemens
had faith in his brother as a newspaper correspondent, though the
two contributions from Cincinnati, already mentioned, were not
promising. Furthermore, we get an intimation of Orion's unfailing
confidence in the future of the "land"--that is to say, the great
tract of land in Eastern Tennessee which, in an earlier day, his
father had bought as a heritage for his children. It is the same
Tennessee land that had "millions in it" for Colonel Sellers--the
land that would become, as Orion Clemens long afterward phrased it,
"the worry of three generations."

The Doctor Kane of this letter is, of course, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane,
the American Arctic explorer. Any book of exploration always
appealed to Mark Twain, and in those days Kane was a favorite.

The paragraph concerning Henry, and his employment on the
Pennsylvania, begins the story of a tragedy. The story has been
fully told elsewhere,--[Mark Twain: A Biography, by same author.]
--and need only be sketched briefly here. Henry, a gentle, faithful
boy, shared with his brother the enmity of the pilot Brown. Some
two months following the date of the foregoing letter, on a down
trip of the Pennsylvania, an unprovoked attack made by Brown upon
the boy brought his brother Sam to the rescue. Brown received a
good pummeling at the hands of the future humorist, who, though
upheld by the captain, decided to quit the Pennsylvania at New
Orleans and to come up the river by another boat. The Brown episode
has no special bearing on the main tragedy, though now in retrospect
it seems closely related to it. Samuel Clemens, coming up the river
on the A. T. Lacey, two days behind the Pennsylvania, heard a voice
shout as they approached the Greenville, Mississippi, landing:

"The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island!
One hundred and fifty lives lost!"

It was a true report. At six o'clock of a warm, mid-June morning,